Boys Don’t Cry is a movie about masks—the false faces people wear to cover deep-seated pain, desire or secrets.
Brandon Teena is a secretive individual who has a whole costume shop full of masks. One night in the early 1990s, Brandon appears out of nowhere in tiny Falls City, Nebraska—full of swagger, charm and a million-watt smile. The local girls swoon over the new kid in town, who woos one girl in particular, Lana (Chloe Sevigny). Brandon knows exactly how to please women and seems too good to be true. The girls of Falls City have never seen a guy quite like this before. “There’s just something about him,” they sigh.
There sure is. Brandon is no guy. He’s actually a girl from Lincoln: Teena Brandon, who’s chopped her hair short and stuffed a sock down her pants in an attempt to enter the man’s world. Teena claims she’s a hermaphrodite (someone with both male and female genitals), but by all appearances, she’s just a very confused young woman who wants to belong to whatever niche of society she can carve.
Teena’s also someone who lives life on the edge. When she arrives in Falls City, she’s stepping into a volatile situation. Lana’s boyfriend and his best friend (Peter Sarsgaard and Brendan Sexton III) are two petty cons fresh from jail. They are intensely possessive of Lana and eventually see this new “guy” as a threat. Just wait until they find that sock stuffed down her jeans. There’s gonna be trouble in Falls City and that starts with “T” and that rhymes with “P” and that stands for powderkeg.
Boys Don’t Cry, based on actual events in 1993, is one of those movies that’s a labor of love by its filmmakers—in this case, director Kimberly Peirce who spent five years researching the story and interviewing people who knew Teena. Peirce has written and directed one other film—The Last Good Breath in 1994—and since then, I’m assuming she devoted most of her life to bringing this story to the screen.
At the risk of sounding cruel, I wished she’d spent a little more time on the project—at least, on the script. The biggest flaw in Boys Don’t Cry, and it’s a big one, is that we never get a glimpse behind Teena’s mask. The first scene opens with her donning a big black cowboy hat and, passing as a guy, swaggering into a Lincoln bar to pick up girls. We never learn why she’s trying to switch genders (her hermaphrodite argument isn’t very convincing). Is she a lesbian or does she just want to sample life from the other side of the sexual fence? We never completely know; she begins and ends the movie as a question mark. The closest we come to understanding her psycho-motives is when she tells someone, late in the film, that she never knew her father. But that remark is quickly brushed past and never explained.
I realize that the real-life Teena Brandon was probably something of a cipher as well, but I kept hoping Peirce would at least provide a reason for us to feel empathy with the character, rather than watching her go through a series of sex scenes with Lana and continually, inexplicably stepping back into dangerous situations. “Less sex, more psychology,” I found myself muttering.
And Boys Don’t Cry is the kind of film that begs for viewer sympathy and understanding. I wanted to deeply feel Teena’s sexual pain, identity confusion and growing love for Lana. Instead, I felt the story kept me at a distance while the masks stayed firmly in place.
In the end, however, Boys Don’t Cry is a strong and haunting film despite its flaws. Peirce brings an interesting style to the film. While there’s no flashy camera tricks, I did like the symbolic use of the sped-up, time-lapse-style shots of the landscape (clouds whizzing by, car lights streaking along streets). The rest of the world spins ahead while the kids of Falls City remain stuck in their hometown humdrum. The landscape may be moving fast, but these kids are going nowhere. Peirce captures small-town angst with aching realism. Lana’s crowd gets their kicks from riding in the back of pickup trucks while holding onto a rope in a macho game of “bumper skiing.” When even that gets too passé, there’s always self-mutilation with a knife blade.
With its near-documentary realism and menacing undertones, Boys Don’t Cry will remind some viewers of films like In Cold Blood and Badlands. There’s also a scene of brutal rape that’s as hard to watch as the one in The Accused.
For all its indie-film TLC, however, Peirce’s film would probably have been little more than a blip at the box office if it weren’t for the sit-up-and-take-notice performances of an excellent cast, including Sevigny, Sexton, Sarsgaard, Jeanetta Arnette as Lana’s mother and Alicia Goranson (who once played Becky, the daughter on Roseanne). They are all dead-on accurate with their portraits of small-town bigotry and anguish.
However, the film belongs, and I mean belongs, to Hilary Swank who gives a once-in-a-lifetime performance as Teena/Brandon which deservedly earned her a Best Actress Oscar (let’s just hope it’s “Katherine Hepburn once-in-a-lifetime” and not “Marisa Tomei once-in-a-lifetime”). Swank—who is, ironically, a native of Lincoln, Nebraska—completely transformed herself for this role. Her searing presence on the screen involves much more than just strapping down her breasts and lowering her voice. It is an inside-out kind of performance—the kind that Robert De Niro would be proud of. And it is all the more amazing when you consider the fact that her biggest previous role was in The Next Karate Kid. It is the most convincing gender-bending performance since 1992’s The Crying Game and was certainly better than last year’s gender-bender Best Actress, Gwyneth Paltrow in Shakespeare in Love (whose win was truly the Marisa Tomei kind of once-in-a-lifetime). There is one scene in particular, where she (as Brandon) goes into the local Quik Stop and shoplifts tampons for herself. The pain of embarrassment is evident in every muscle of her bony face. It is a moment when I actually felt something for the character…I just wish I’d understood her mysterious ways.
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